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News

January 10, 2018

After 28 years as a professor of Earth and planetary science at UC Berkeley, Mark Richards will be leaving Berkeley in June to become the provost and executive vice president for academic affairs at the University of Washington.

January 4, 2018

Although August’s total solar eclipse was over in minutes, analysis of the 50,000 photos uploaded to the Eclipse Megamovie website is a time-consuming job, so team leaders are asking citizen scientists for help.

December 17, 2017

When Carol Christ’s staff asked her how she wanted to be sworn in as UC Berkeley’s 11th chancellor, she immediately knew the answer: with 600 new graduates and their families.

Christ, who is the first woman to lead the university in its 149-year history, was formally inaugurated on Sunday, just minutes before presenting Ph.D., master’s and bachelor’s degrees to the winter graduating class.

December 14, 2017

UC Berkeley has received more than 89,000 applications from high school students seeking admission to the 2018-19 freshman class, and an additional 19,000 from students seeking admission as transfer students. The numbers set yet another record year in freshman applications submitted.

Like swinging a tennis racket during a ball toss to serve an ace, slow and speedy brainwaves during deep sleep must sync up at exactly the right moment to hit the save button on new memories, according to new UC Berkeley research.
While these brain rhythms, occurring hundreds of times a night, move in perfect lockstep in young adults, findings published today in the journal Neuron show that, in old age, slow waves during non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep fail to make timely contact with speedy electrical bursts known as “spindles.”

December 13, 2017

The National Endowment for the Humanities today announced $12.8 million in financial support for humanities research across the country, including funding for College of Letters & Science projects that deal with the works of Herman Melville, the rise of the Chinese meritocracy, the preservation of rare musical instruments, slave conspiracies, the relationship of Mexican women to the Catholic church and politics and the Nazi-era theft of music.

It’s easy to know what you think, but it’s much harder to know why you think it.
That’s the credo that guides Berkeley Law lecturer Alan Pomerantz when he teaches his undergraduate seminar, Current Political and Moral Conflicts and the U.S. Constitution. It’s a course designed to push students to their limits, challenging them to think critically about controversial topics, from abortion rights to the First Amendment.

Robert Full wants to tap the diverse experiences of UC Berkeley undergraduates to teach them the fun of discovering biology’s secrets and the innovations that can spring from hacking them.
Maybe he’ll spark a few entrepreneurs in the process.

December 11, 2017

Christopher Richardson has been playing the piano since he was 8 years old. He’s a sophomore at UC Berkeley, and intends to triple major in music, economics and molecular and cell biology. He’s on the pre-med track and is considering going into oncology.

December 8, 2017

UC Berkeley undergraduates Kelly Richeson and Gina Niceforo are proud to be Bears. But the 56-year-old retired Ventura County firefighter and the 37-year-old former South Lake Tahoe waitress are equally glad to be OWLs.
They’re members of Older Wiser Learners (OWLs), a support group on campus that’s gaining popularity with Berkeley’s 1,660-plus undergraduate re-entry students, who are defined as age 25 and older and having had at least a five-year absence from college.

December 4, 2017

As part of the De-Stress Week before finals, which start next week, UC Berkeley’s student government spent $400 to bring four llamas to Memorial Glade for three hours Monday afternoon. The glade is right next to the 24-hour library during so-called dead week, when a crushing load of term papers and unread lecture notes can cause blood pressure to skyrocket.

December 1, 2017

Neha Zahid, a junior double major in public health and molecular biology at UC Berkeley, traveled to Nepal in the winter of 2016 to teach proper nutrition and oral hygiene, provide basic preventive dental care and emergency treatment, and measure indicators of oral health and nutrition in the local children and families. Hands-on research experiences like these have become a hallmark of the Berkeley undergraduate education, where students are participating in discovery experiences that are the very essence of research.

November 29, 2017

While an undergraduate at UC Berkeley in 2002, David Harris came up with the idea to record a day in an ordinary person’s life and share their specialness. Almost 15 years later, the Global Lives Project launched by Harris includes 20 videos of individuals from every corner of the world, ranging from a college student in Tokyo and a traveling clown in Spain, to a Vietnamese sand barge worker and a train attendant in China as they go about 24 consecutive hours in their lives.

A Talk by Mike Summers, Ph.D.

Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry

Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator

November 28, 2017

In a brief talk in May at Cal Future Forum, Professor David Ackerly discussed what new approaches will be necessary to protect the diversity of California’s flora and fauna as they adapt to a changing climate.